The optimal choice for performing immediate, ad-hoc exploratory analysis on structured log data is a serverless interactive query service that directly analyzes data in storage, using familiar SQL syntax, requires no infrastructure to manage, and scales automatically. Amazon Athena meets all these criteria. Alternatives such as a managed data lake solution or a business intelligence service, are less suitable primarily because they serve different stages of the data analysis pipeline – the former for data storage and security configuration, and the latter for visualizations and business intelligence insights post data analysis rather than raw data processing.